This book explores how legality—often hailed as the cornerstone of democracies, late capitalism, and the liberal international order—is mobilized within International Relations. Law is frequently viewed as a resource to pacify an anarchical international environment, a means to end war, reduce migrant deaths, combat ‘bad’ governance, or prevent global warming. In this edited volume, we invert the assumed relationship between legality and injustices by asking to what extent law enables violence: from migrant deaths to lives lost in the name of “freeing” populations under a so‑called “global” rule of law. While critical scholars have highlighted how law can produce violence, they have typically focused on discriminatory practices or the instrumentalization of law, without fully examining how these practices are maintained through appeals to law’s formal structures and the legitimacy they confer. This edited volume brings together empirical and theoretical contributions that interrogate how legality is used to justify and enable violence and domination in international politics.
